Sarah on guitar
We awoke the next day exhausted but with too many plans to rest. We rented a canoe from the hostel, strapped it to the top of Sarah's car and drove into the Everglades.
I grew up in Florida, but had never been to the Everglades, an oversight I felt needed to be corrected. They are beautiful: a peaceful, waterlogged wonderland that we sought to see close up by launching the canoe at 9 mile lake for a 5.5 mile looped "trail" of following marked poles.
They took us through tunnels of mangroves, through shallow (less than two-feet deep) rivers and past wide, sprawling rivers of grass. The birds were the most beautiful, especially the huge white herons that would take the the sky at our approach. We were alone on that trail, a peaceful few hours of paddling and just being out in what was for me, a completely new, visually-rich, environment.
Paddling through a tunnel of mangroves
Sarah paddling
Paddling on a river
Despite seeing lots of fish and birds, we went the whole trail without seeing a single alligator. It was only when we had finished, strapped the canoe to the car and were driving off that we saw a huge one--at least 12 feet--in the water we had just been in. Sarah stopped the car and we got out. A man with a camera was standing at water's edge focusing on the alligator and I walked up beside him.
Noticing me watching the gator, he says "I thought you two were going to hit that one over there." Following his indicating finger, I saw the snout of a four foot long gator sticking out of the water, not three feet from where we had beached the canoe. Past it, another gator, this one nearly ten feet, was lying in the water as well.
The gator we had brought our canoe up beside
It turns out that the gators spent the cold morning on the bottom of the lakes and rivers, and since we hadn't seen one in hours of paddling, we gave up looking for them. It turns out they had been beneath us much of the time, and were now just surfacing in the afternoon heat.
After the canoing, we decided to do a "swamp slog". We drove along the roads, looking for a close looking cypress dome. These are cypresses:
For reasons unknown to me (but probably known to botanists), the cypresses will sometimes grow together in tight clumps that form dome shapes. Spotting one, we parked the car on the side of the road, took paddles to ward of possible gators and jumped into the swamp.
Here, you can see Sarah walking towards a cypress dome
Walking in the swamp was cool for a little bit, legs pushing through the dead heads of cat o' nine tails and the hundreds of shells from what appeared to be a snail genocide. But then we hit thick patches of saw grass that cut at our hands and faces as we pushed through it.
Some of the hundreds of snail shells floating in the swamp. I don't know what killed them
Finally, though, we arrived at the cypress dome. Inside, it was like a little tropical jungle. Mosquitos, which had not bothered us on the canoe trip or up till that point in the slog, descended on us. It was winter, so they were few, but I have read that they are massive swarms in the swamp in the summer, and that some early settlers of Florida were driven mad by the constant attacks.
Me, hiking in the swamp
Inside the dome, we found beautiful purple and red flowers, and hundreds of bromiliads. The bromiliads are not part of the trees, but grow on them.
Bromeliads
Tired as we were from paddling and slogging, that was not the end of the day, though. We returned the canoe, washed up, packed our things and took off for Miami Beach. After all, it was a Friday night.
But that is another post...